Turkish Novelist Orhan Pamuk, aged fifty-four and native of Istanbul, where he has lived nearly all his life, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. While his initial popularity in Turkey has declined because of the increasing complexity of his work, since the 1990s Pamuk has won increasing international acclaim as his works have been widely translated (Faber is his English publisher). Five novels have been translated: The White Castle (1990), winner of the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction; The Black Book (1994); The New Life (1997), a bestseller in Turkey; My Name Is Red (2001), winner of the IMPAC Dublin Award (2003); and Snow (2004).

Pamuk’s main preoccupation is with identity, developed at a personal and cultural level, and invested with distinctive resonance through the ambivalence of tensions between East and West, for all the novels have historic reverberations. His books involve a quest. Is it possible to have, let alone to know, a distinctive self or nationality? Easy answers are ruled out by the characters’ blindness, their perverse desire to be someone else.